Chapter : 1381

  "Hey!" Lloyd shouted, waving a hand. "Down here! You forgot to lock the back door!"

  Wilfred looked down. His eyes widened in genuine shock. He hadn't expected Lloyd to return so soon, and certainly not by appearing out of thin air in the middle of his stronghold. The shock quickly replaced by a twisted, maniacal grin.

  "You," Wilfred’s voice was amplified by magic, booming across the courtyard. "The thief. The liar. You came back to die?"

  "I came back to file a noise complaint," Lloyd yelled back. "Your giant laser is very loud. It’s disturbing the neighbors. Also, you stole a rock that belongs in a museum. That’s just rude."

  The soldiers in the courtyard finally noticed Lloyd. A circle of spears and swords formed around him, but no one attacked yet. They were waiting for orders, and honestly, they were a bit terrified of a man who appeared from nowhere and started heckling their lord.

  Wilfred laughed. It was a wet, unpleasant sound. "You are a fool. You think you can stop progress? You think you can stop the future? I have unlocked the secrets of the ancients! I have become a god!"

  "You're not a god," Lloyd corrected him. "You're a guy with a very expensive hobby and a bad haircut. Now, hand over the Heart and turn off the machine, and maybe I won't dismantle your castle brick by brick."

  "Dismantle?" Wilfred sneered. "You are an ant threatening a mountain. I was going to hunt you down, but since you delivered yourself to me, I will grant you the honor of being the first test subject."

  Wilfred raised his hands to the sky. The ground beneath the fortress began to rumble. It wasn't a subtle vibration; it was a deep, tectonic groaning that shook the teeth in Lloyd's skull. The soldiers scrambled back, looking terrified. Even they didn't know what was coming.

  "Awaken!" Wilfred screamed. "Awaken, King of the Earth! Sovereign of the Stone! Rise and cleanse the world!"

  The central keep of the fortress didn't just open; it exploded outward. massive chunks of masonry, size of carriages, were tossed into the air like pebbles. Dust billowed out in a choking cloud. Through the dust, two burning lights appeared. They were eyes. Eyes the size of shields, glowing with a hateful, purple light fueled by Aethel-Quartz.

  A hand, made of black iron and ancient stone, smashed through the wall. It was massive. A single finger was larger than Lloyd. The creature pulled itself up from the depths of the earth, rising higher and higher until it blocked out the sun.

  It was a Golem. But it wasn't like the clumsy clay constructs Lloyd had seen in books. This was a masterpiece of ancient engineering. It stood two hundred feet tall. Its body was a complex lattice of moving gears, shifting stone plates, and pulsing veins of quartz. It didn't look like a statue; it looked like a mechanical god.

  "Behold!" Wilfred cried out in ecstasy. "The Sovereign! The God-King!"

  Lloyd craned his neck back, looking up... and up... and up. "Okay," he muttered. "That is significantly bigger than I expected. I might need a bigger sword."

  The Golem let out a sound that wasn't a roar, but the grinding screech of metal on stone, amplified a thousand times. It was a sound that made your bones ache. The sheer pressure radiating from it was suffocating. This wasn't just a big rock; it was a Sovereign-Level entity. In terms of raw power, it rivaled the strongest spirits Lloyd had ever seen.

  "Kill him," Wilfred commanded, pointing a shaking finger at Lloyd. "Crush the insect."

  The Golem looked down. Its purple eyes locked onto Lloyd. It raised a fist the size of a house.

  Lloyd didn't move. He didn't run. He closed his eyes for a split second, centering himself. He reached deep into his core, finding the reservoirs of power he had unlocked the night before.

  "Alright, big guy," Lloyd whispered, his eyes snapping open. "Let's see if you can hit a ghost."

  The massive stone fist descended. It didn't just fall; it crashed down with the speed of a falling meteor. The air pressure alone was enough to flatten a normal man.

  Lloyd activated [Void Steps].

  Flash.

  He vanished in a blur of azure light just as the fist slammed into the courtyard.

  BOOM.

  The impact was cataclysmic. The stone floor shattered, sending a shockwave of dust and debris rippling outward. Soldiers were knocked off their feet. The fortress walls groaned. Where Lloyd had been standing a microsecond ago, there was now a crater deep enough to bury a house.

  Chapter : 1382

  Lloyd reappeared fifty feet in the air, standing on the Golem’s arm. He wasn't just dodging; he was attacking.

  "Gate One: Open," Lloyd commanded internally.

  He felt the limiter in his brain snap. His muscles surged with power.

  "Gate Two: Open."

  His heart hammered like a war drum. His blood burned.

  "Gate Three: Open."

  Power flooded his solar plexus.

  "Gate Four: Open!"

  His spine cracked with energy. He felt light. He felt invincible. He felt like he could punch a mountain and win.

  Lloyd sprinted up the Golem's arm, moving faster than the eye could follow. He drew his sword. It wasn't a special magical blade; it was just a piece of steel. But in his hands, with the power of the Four Gates, it was a weapon of mass destruction.

  "Style Change," Lloyd hissed. "[Obsolete Sword Art: Ten-Armed Asura]."

  He swung his sword. But he didn't just swing it once. To the observers below, it looked like Lloyd suddenly exploded into a blur of motion. Ten phantom arms fanned out from his shoulders, each holding a spectral blade. It wasn't magic; it was speed and afterimages, a technique so fast it tricked reality.

  He reached the Golem's shoulder joint. A massive gear was turning there, exposed and vulnerable.

  "Break!" Lloyd roared.

  He struck. Ten swords hit the same spot at the exact same millisecond. The sound was like a thunderclap.

  CLANG-CRACK!

  The metal plating on the Golem’s shoulder shattered. Shards of ancient iron flew like shrapnel. Lloyd carved a deep gouge into the mechanism, severing a hydraulic line that sprayed glowing purple fluid.

  "Got you!" Lloyd grinned.

  The Golem staggered slightly. Wilfred, watching from the tower, screamed in outrage. "It is a scratch! You cannot stop a god with a toothpick!"

  As Lloyd prepared for a second strike, he watched in horror as the purple fluid stopped leaking. The quartz veins around the wound pulsed with light. The stone and metal began to flow like liquid. Within seconds, the gouge filled itself in. The metal knit back together. The armor reformed.

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  It healed.

  "You have got to be kidding me," Lloyd said, staring at the pristine shoulder. "Self-repair? That is cheating. That is definitely cheating."

  The Golem didn't pause. It swatted at its shoulder like a human swatting a mosquito. Lloyd had to Void Step away, appearing in mid-air near the chest.

  "Okay," Lloyd thought, his mind racing. "It heals. It heals fast. That means I can't chip away at it. I have to destroy the core. I have to hit the Heart."

  He looked at the chest. There, behind layers of translucent crystal armor, he could see the Golem Heart pulsing. It was the center of the purple web.

  "Target acquired," Lloyd muttered.

  He pushed his body to the limit. He dive-bombed towards the chest. He focused all the power of the Four Gates into a single point on his sword. He activated the Asura style again, focusing all ten phantom strikes into a singular, piercing drill.

  "Open up!" Lloyd shouted.

  He slammed into the crystal armor.

  CRUNCH.

  The impact sent a shockwave through his arm that nearly dislocated his shoulder. The crystal cracked. A spiderweb of fractures appeared. But it didn't shatter. It was harder than diamond.

  And then, the Golem reacted. It didn't punch him. The quartz veins on its chest flared blindingly bright.

  "Uh oh," Lloyd said.

  A pulse of pure repulsive force erupted from the chest. It hit Lloyd like a physical wall. It blew him backward, tumbling through the air. He crashed into one of the fortress towers, smashing through the stone wall and tumbling into a dusty storage room.

  He groaned, pulling himself out of the rubble. His body ached. The Four Gates were taking a toll. His muscles felt like they were tearing.

  "Okay," Lloyd coughed, spitting out dust. "It heals instantly. It has force fields. And it's really, really hard. My attacks aren't doing anything. It's like trying to empty the ocean with a spoon."

  He looked out the hole in the wall. The Golem was turning towards him. It opened its mouth, and a purple light began to gather in its throat. It was charging the beam. The same beam that had vaporized a mountain.

  Lloyd scrambled to his feet. He realized with a cold, sinking feeling that he couldn't win this fight. Not with brute force. He was outmatched. He was fighting a mountain that could heal itself.

  "I need a Plan B," Lloyd muttered, watching the purple light grow brighter. "And I need it in about three seconds."

  Chapter : 1383

  He prepared to Void Step again, knowing he could only run. He could dodge for a while, but eventually, he would tire. And the Golem... the Golem didn't get tired. It just kept coming.

  "Mina," Lloyd whispered, hoping she was safe, hoping she was far away. "I really hope you found something in that library. Because right now, I'm just a very annoying fly, and the swatter is coming down."

  The beam fired. Lloyd vanished into the void just as the tower he was standing in was erased from existence.

  While Lloyd was busy playing tag with a two-hundred-foot tall metal god, Mina was waging a war of her own. But her battlefield smelled of old paper and dust, and her weapon was a pair of reading glasses.

  She was back in Elder Corin’s hut on the Whispering Crag. When the earth had started shaking—tremors that could be felt even miles away—she knew Wilfred had activated the machine. She could see the purple flashes of light lighting up the night sky like a demonic thunderstorm.

  "He is fighting," Mina whispered, gripping the edge of the table. "He is actually fighting that thing."

  Elder Corin sat in his rocking chair, looking grim. "He is dying," the old man corrected. "No one fights a Sovereign Golem and lives. It is math. It is inevitable."

  "Math can be wrong," Mina snapped. She turned back to the pile of scrolls and books scattered on the table. "There has to be a way. Anubis was a genius, but he wasn't a monster. He built a failsafe. Every engineer builds a failsafe."

  She was frantically searching through a stack of Anubis's personal notes that Corin had kept hidden for decades. They were chaotic, filled with diagrams of soul-transference and crystallization theories.

  "The quartz," Mina muttered, scanning a page of dense text. "It's the key. The quartz acts as the battery. It draws life force and converts it into motive energy."

  "We know this," Corin grunted. "It eats life. To stop it, you must destroy the quartz. But the quartz is inside the armor. And the armor heals."

  "No," Mina said, her eyes darting across the lines. "Not destroy. Neutralize. Anubis wrote about 'Resonance Rejection'. He was worried about the quartz becoming unstable. He worried about a feedback loop."

  She flipped the page. There, in the margin, was a scribbled formula. It wasn't a spell. It was a chemical recipe.

  To silence the Whispering Crystal, one must introduce the Silence.

  "The Silence," Mina read aloud. "What is the Silence?"

  She grabbed another book, a glossary of archaic alchemical terms. She flipped through it frantically. S... Si... Silence.

  "Here!" she cried. "'The Silence: A theoretical compound created by grinding Void-Stone and mixing it with the ash of a burnt Elder Tree. It creates a localized anti-resonance field.'"

  She looked back at Anubis's notes. The diagram showed a fine powder being dispersed into the air intake of the Golem's core.

  When the Silence touches the Crystal, the song stops. The vibration ceases. The connection to the ether is severed.

  "It's a dampener," Mina realized. "It's not an explosive. It's sand in the gears. If we get this powder into the Golem's system, it stops the quartz from absorbing energy. It starves the beast."

  She looked at Elder Corin. "Do you have Void-Stone? Do you have ash?"

  Corin looked at her, surprised by her intensity. "I have ash. I burn wood every day. Void-Stone... I have a small meteorite I use as a doorstop."

  Mina ran to the door. There, holding it open, was a black, heavy rock.

  "This is it," she said, picking it up. "This is the bullet."

  "You intend to make this... Anti-Aethel Quartz?" Corin asked. "Here? Now?"

  "I have to," Mina said. She dragged a heavy mortar and pestle to the center of the table. "Lloyd can't kill it. He's just buying time. If I don't bring this to him, he dies."

  She smashed the Void-Stone with a hammer, breaking off chunks, then threw them into the mortar. She added handfuls of ash from the fireplace. She began to grind.

  It was hard work. Her arms burned. Sweat dripped down her forehead. But she didn't stop. She ground the stone and ash until it was a fine, grey dust. She poured her desperation and her fear into the motion.

  "Faster," she told herself. "He doesn't have time."

  Outside, another boom echoed through the mountains. The ground shook, knocking a jar off the shelf.

  "He is still fighting," Mina said, grinding harder. "Hold on, Lloyd. Just hold on."

  Chapter : 1384

  She wasn't a warrior. She couldn't swing a sword or cast a fireball. But she was a scholar. And right now, knowledge was the deadliest weapon on the battlefield. She was going to kill a god with a bowl of dust.

  Mina finished grinding. The bowl was full of a fine, silvery-grey powder. It shimmered in the candlelight, looking innocuous, like glitter or sand. But Mina knew it was the off-switch for the apocalypse.

  "Anti-Aethel Quartz," she breathed. "I hope this works."

  She needed a container. Something fragile that would break on impact. She found a clay jar on Corin's shelf. She poured the powder inside and sealed it with a piece of wax cloth.

  "I am going," Mina announced. She grabbed her cloak.

  "You are walking to your death," Elder Corin said. "The battlefield is a slaughterhouse. You are a librarian."

  "I am a Siddik," Mina said, her chin high. "And I am his partner. I do not leave my partners behind."

  She ran out of the hut. The descent down the Whispering Crag was terrifying in the dark. The path was lit only by the flashing purple lights of the battle in the distance. She slipped, scraped her hands, and tore her dress, but she didn't stop.

  As she reached the valley floor, she saw the scale of the destruction. The fortress was a ruin. The Golem towered over everything, a silhouette of nightmare against the burning sky.

  She saw a tiny blue spark darting around the Golem. Lloyd. He was still moving. He was still fighting.

  "He's alive," she gasped, relief flooding her chest.

  She found a horse tied to a tree near the base of the trail—Lloyd's horse. She mounted it awkwardly. She wasn't a great rider, but she kicked the beast into a gallop.

  "Go!" she screamed. "Run!"

  The horse thundered towards the fortress. As she got closer, the heat became intense. The air smelled of ozone and crushed rock.

  She rode through the shattered main gate. The courtyard was a wasteland of craters. Soldiers were fleeing or hiding. No one paid attention to a woman on a horse. All eyes were fixed on the duel of giants.

  Mina saw Lloyd land on a ruined wall. He looked terrible. His clothes were shredded. He was bleeding from a dozen cuts. He was panting, his chest heaving.

  The Golem raised both fists for a smash that would flatten the entire section of the wall.

  "Lloyd!" Mina screamed. Her voice was lost in the roar of the machine.

  She rode closer. She had to get his attention. She had to get close enough to throw the jar.

  Lloyd looked up. He saw her. His eyes widened in horror. He waved his hand frantically, mouthing, Go away!

  Mina shook her head. She held up the clay jar. She pointed at it, then pointed at the Golem.

  Lloyd paused. He looked at the jar. He looked at her determination. He understood. He didn't know what was in the jar, but he knew Mina. She wouldn't be here unless she had the answer.

  He nodded once. A grim, determined nod.

  He turned back to the Golem. He needed to create an opening. He needed to get the Golem to expose its core intake vents.

  "Hey! Ugly!" Lloyd shouted, his voice amplified by his remaining mana. "Is that all you got? My grandmother hits harder than you!"

  The Golem roared. It focused entirely on Lloyd.

  "Mina," Lloyd thought, preparing to jump. "Don't miss. Please don't miss."

  He launched himself into the air, straight at the Golem's face. It was a suicide run. A distraction.

  Mina watched him go. She steered her horse towards the Golem's legs. She needed to get to the ventilation grates on its massive chest. She couldn't throw it that high.

  "I need height," she realized.

  She saw a fallen tower leaning against the Golem's leg like a ramp. It was unstable. It was dangerous.

  "Do it," she told herself.

  She jumped off the horse and scrambled up the rubble. Stones shifted under her feet. The Golem moved, shaking the makeshift ramp. Mina stumbled, cutting her knee, but she kept climbing.

  She reached the top of the ruin. She was fifty feet in the air. The Golem's chest was still above her, but closer. The vents were glowing purple, sucking in air to cool the massive quartz engine.

  Lloyd was buzzing around the Golem's head, slashing at its eyes with his phantom swords, keeping it distracted. The Golem swatted at him, opening its chest plates to vent excess heat.

  "Now!" Lloyd screamed, though she couldn't hear him. He dove downwards, leading the Golem's gaze away from her.